I see you are new to our Monastery: so let me bid you welcome and may your search for more Perl-wisdom be fruitful.

It is the custom in our Monastery that you show the code you have written to solve your problem or otherwise show us that you have at least tried to solve the problem. The Monastery is not a "Solve-my-homework-for-me"-service!

That being said, did you try to use the m// function? It tries to match a regular expression against another string and returns true if the match succeed:

use strict;
my $text='Try to find the hidden string here!';
if ($text=~m/\bhidden\b/) {
   print "We found the hidden string!\n";
}
else {
   print "No match, sorry.\n";
}
[download]

Some explanation:

• =~ binds the match operator to the $text variable, so it knows where to look.
• m/ / is the match function.
• \b matches on any boundary between a word and not a word, i.e. the beginning or end of a word, so you are certain not to look for part of words.
• hidden is of course the string to search for.

Now for the other part of your question: What other word do you need to grab? Do you know what that word will be beforehand or is it just any word before or after the first word you found? Why do you want to analyse it character-by-character? That seems a bit artificial.

Update: as japhy and ysth told me, the marker for the word boundary is \b. I have updated the example program above. What do we learn from such errors: Never try to do any serious work before your second cup of strong tea!